Hitman: Subtitle Boasts A “Living World”

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In what must surely be the last-but-three trailer before Hitman: Absolution gets a launch trailer (the game appears on November 20th), Square are trying to show off the “living world” in which their game of death and baldness take place. As Adam noted as we watched this in the RPS virtual office, “That Chinatown sequence about 40 secs in is awesome.” It really, genuinely is awesome – but is it really game-representative? Is that crowd actually in game and not just a cutscenetrick? I suppose we’ll find out soon enough…

Yeah, it’s looking really handsome. And I am definitely in the mood for Hitman. It’ll be a refreshing difference after Dishonored overdose, even if it isn’t as good as Blood Money. (Which it might be: who knows!)

Yeah the first time when the level loaded I actually just stood in the middle of the crowd with :O expression in real life for a min or two. Then I spent rest of the time bumping into people for no reason.

I think the marketing people are purposefully not aiming at the segment of the population that knows what makes a Hitman game good. The point of the marketing is to sell as many copies as possible. This means convincing new people to play the game.

If you’ve already played and enjoyed Hitman games, they are betting that you will be sold on the less widely released gameplay trailers and other media that isn’t as tightly related to marketing.

Disclaimer: I did not watch this specific trailer yet, just my 2 pennies on why the marketing for this game (and ACIII) seems to suck so bad from the gamer’s perspective.

This is all very well but scripted conversations and eye candy is not what makes a Hitman game. In short what defines a good Hitman game is replayabilty.

I really hope they don’t go the route of the Splinter Cell series on this one and defecate on the core gameplay in order to turn it into an interactive action movie. That said I enjoyed Conviction a lot in the afternoon it took me to play it but it’s replay value was nil.

I want to be challenged and forced to patiently wait and observe without the game throwing the way forward in my face. I want earning the Silent Assassin grade on levels to be a real achievement like in the first two games in the PS2 era.

I still have Conviction installed and have replayed the Single Player almost as much as I have replayed DeusEx. Conviction was bloody awesome, these best Splinter Cell game for me (having played all since the series started) and I am disappointed in what they are working on now.

Conviction, great story and sexy presentation, awesome visuals and beautiful action. Loved it. I wish there were more levels in SP..

This trailer hits the right buttons for me, but to be honest I do not trust it. It sounds to good to be true. If they can really pull off that living breathing world this game will be awesome, because that is exactly what I look for in a game.

I think it’s going to do a lot of things better than Blood Money, mechanically speaking. Features like fake surrender, the improvement on non-lethal takedowns(it’s more time consuming to knock someone out instead of straight up killing them) and of course much improved controls. Although I didn’t have much problem with Blood Money’s control as opposed to a lot of the complainers.

The level design is going to suffer most likely but I’m still pretty optimistic on this one.

Yeah, I think it would be hard for any game to top Blood Money’s level design. I’m kind of suprised BM doesn’t get talked about more often during the big immersive sim discussions here. I mean, obviously Jim loved it but to me it seems hugely under-represented. It’s one of the most perfect games there is, in terms of realising the potential of the “one city block” idea. The amount of interlocking pieces that comprise each stage is just huge, and every interaction was at least valid, and usually surprising too. Maybe it just gets ignored because everything happened in one level, rather than having your choices carry over through the whole game a la Deus Ex.

Hitman is one of the few series that I’d say has genuinely improved with every single installment to date (maybe Silent Assassin was better, but that’s partially nostalgia — when it came out, we hadn’t seen anything quite like it before, while the later games were more following in its footsteps. Still, I think they found ways to improve.)

I suspect this one will be the same way; the trailers for Hitman games have always been a little bit unrepresentative of how the game really plays, anyway.

Jim you may be a little misguided there with all the Blood Money praise that you throw around under every Hitman video. I’m a huge hitman player and while blood Money was very good it was also incredibly flawed in so many ways, i don’t see any reasons why Absolution would be worse.

I did have a few issues with the last two levels (there were forced “boss battles”, which were ridiculous and utterly unlike Hitman — one was skippable, but two others weren’t, as far as I could tell. And the white house just didn’t feel like the white house — probably deliberately, since they didn’t want to be accused of making too accurate in a game like that.) But those are ultimately minor quibbles when compared to the rest of the game, which was excellent.

Every Hitman game has had a few bad levels (remember the Japan levels in Silent Assassin?) It’s inevitable when so much of the game depends on its level design. But they’re still all good games overall.

Guys, Oblivion will have Radiant AI, every single NPC will live his own life in the-

Oh wait, wrong game, sorry.

I’ll take this trailer with a grain of salt. Luckily the AI in the Hitman games was always silly so I doubt they’ll make it outright worse. My biggest concern was that they blew too much of the budget on voicework.